Notes

The Result is Operation Fox Assault



The Rinkhals have Eclectic Tastes (PyWeek 9).

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This week Confluence, Jerith, Nitwit, David and I took part in PyWeek 9 - an online challenge to create a computer game within one week. The result is Operation Fox Assault. It's sort of like what Warcraft could have been if the characters were chickens and the game was written in just a week. Mac, Windows and Linux downloads are available on our team page.



Here are some thoughts about the PyWeek that took place.



Each PyWeek begins with the participants choosing the theme. The result is announced at midnight GMT on the Saturday. This is the start of the one-week period of development. Final submissions must be uploaded by midnight the following Saturday, although there is a twenty-four hour grace period after that to allow developers to solve critical bugs or figure out issues with packaging and uploading their submissions.



This PyWeek's theme for this year was 'Feather. The following Sunday, after the announcement, the core Rinkhals team gathered at the Yola offices to discuss game ideas and strategize. Jerith was the person who developed the concept for Operation Fox Assault. However, the entire team was already using the idea. Tsa club A couple of whiteboard sketches later and we were engaged in game development. At first Confluence was creating artwork, Jerith was creating the tile map and Nitwit and I were running around putting the general architecture such as the game engine.



Based on discussions overheard on th #pyweek channel it appears that we were among the few teams that got off to a fast start. Many of those represented on the channel were searching for basic game concepts on the second day of the contest.



In the wake of the first session, there were two points that could be extremely helpful in the week ahead.



The team was enthusiastic about the concept. - We were real about what we could achieve. Nitwit mentioned that we each had about twenty hours of development time available and, although we did extend that a bit by working long evenings during the week, I think it was a good estimation of the time available.



At the end of the first day, we had a game that ran and displayed the game board.



The remainder of the week was filled with development, except Tuesday evening when we played V:tES. Jerith visited our house on Wednesday to program. Sometime in the middle of the week David joined the team and added sound. One developer had come across an unrelated piece of code, and quickly passed on by other developers which resulted in fully functional features.



The tight deadline was surprising in a programming perspective. Gone was agonizing over how to structure code, or long-term maintainability. The picking of low-hanging fruit and speedy development were the order of the day.



Team Rinkhals is most likely to be the most talented development team I've ever had the pleasure to be part of . I've developed a new appreciation for what a difference a talented team makes. I was never asked to explain programming concepts or svn merge concepts to someone. Or dive into the internals a library to find a solution for another. I felt confident that I could trust the code of my colleagues - which was important because there was no time to read it.



We were feeling pretty good by the time Saturday arrived. Operation Fox Assault was in good shape , and while there were a reasonable number of things left on the to-do list most of them were minor tweaks and polishing. The big outstanding items were packaging the game for Windows (using py2exe) and Mac (using py2app). I got stuck into the py2exe work in the early evening. There were a few scary moments when the py2exe build was failing, but around ten o'clock, the Windows packaging was sorted out and we went to Roxy's restaurant for a relaxed dinner. We returned shortly before midnight. Jerith completed the packaging of py2app, while we all fixed minor bugs before we submitted our entry at 2:00 AM.



The only thing to do is to be a part of the judging, which will continue until the end this week. While I'm eager to see Fox Assault succeed, I am extremely happy that we have come up with a very interesting game. The three hours I spent playing the game in unlimited mode are proof to this.



The Wikipedia entry offers more details about the flavors of the rinkhals.



P.S. P.S. Also, Nitwit's article on our PyWeek experiences can be found here.


Website: https://tsaclub.com/